Passive endurance or active coping? Resilience profiles and wartime well-being among novice non-tenured English language teachers

Geopolitical conflicts disrupt education profoundly, yet the specific vulnerabilities of novice, non-tenured teachers during wartime and the impacts of individual difference variables remain underexplored. Thus, adopting a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design in which the quantitative phase was used for classifying participants, this study investigates the psychological well-being of Iranian novice, non-tenured English language teachers during the US-Israeli invasion of Iran and explores how teachers with different resilience profiles responded to war-induced stressors. To classify participants into high- and low-resilience groups, a resilience scale was administered to 64 teachers. Subsequently, in the second phase, which was purely qualitative, 14 participants engaged in semi-structured interviews, narrative frames, and metaphor prompts to explore how their well-being has been affected during the war. Findings revealed that both high- and low-resilience teachers shared experiences of diminished well-being, emerging from three main sources: (a) the dual burden of emotional burnout, (b) career pessimism and turnover intentions, and (c) social isolation coupled with a lack of institutional support. However, teachers with different resilience profiles responded differently to these stressors. While low-resilience teachers mainly engaged in passive endurance, which exacerbated ill-being, high-resilience teachers sustained their well-being through active coping mechanisms, including peer collaboration and collective reflection, meaning-making strategies and purpose reconstruction, and recalling past adverse experiences and applying learned coping strategies. The study underscores the potential value of resilience-oriented strategies for supporting novice non-tenured teachers in navigating difficult circumstances amid war.